“The Bear Market Economics Phenomenon” is an observation of Political Economics. Wall Street Admits: ‘We Got Rich Off the Backs of Workers’ thus creating the Bear Market. The Bear Market is America's default war.
The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The Biggest Lie: How Much Does Stuff Really Cost?

How Much Does It Really Cost?

This deserves a bigger article, but it is too important to beleaguer. First, the Cost of Living Index must be reconfigured. For the umpteenth time I have heard how food prices have not gone up. I do not know what foods they look at, but I know I am paying more.

On a lot of items, the actual price has not gone up but the amount in the box, bag, or can has decreased dramatically.

The last thing, we must stop this ethanol thing.

1.) It is driving up food prices.

2.) It takes 4 gallons of water and energy to produce 1 gallon of ethanol.

We do not have enough food, much less water, to support this.

Additionally, to be a good fuel, a substance should have a very low flash point. Gasoline has a flash point of a -45° F. The flashpoint of ethanol is 62°F. Ethanol burns over 100° cooler than gasoline. WHAT that means is that it is much less efficient as a fuel.

We are adding ethanol to gasoline to make our fuel supply bigger. The problem is that, when added to gasoline, we cannot drive as far as we did before it was added. The result is NOT a net ZERO because we have raised our food prices and wasted a lot of water.

I’m a person who likes background noise while I work, so I tend to turn the TV on when I’m writing. One of my latest fascinations is the show Hoarding: Buried Alive.

For those who have not seen the show, each episode profiles two people who have a problem with hoarding. These people’s homes are basically uninhabitable, because there is stuff piled everywhere. The homes are health hazards, as there is no way to effectively clean around the junk, not to mention the fire hazards the piles of stuff create. And most importantly, these people are losing their relationships with their families, as the families can’t handle the hoarding problem.

Hoarding is an extreme example, but even on smaller levels, “stuff” has a price. Too much stuff can cost you in several areas.

Financial Costs

Stuff costs money. First you have to buy the stuff. Then you have to store the stuff. When you add it all up, how much does it cost?

Eight years ago we moved 100 miles down the road from a small house to an even smaller duplex. For the first couple of years we rented a storage unit for our excess stuff. And for what? We never went to the storage unit. We never used our stuff. Fortunately we wised up and downsized our stuff, and at the same time downsized our monthly expenses.

Cost of Time

Stuff takes time to manage. When you have stuff cluttering your house, it takes longer to clean and dust your house. When your stuff is unorganized, it takes time to find things.

Too much stuff can also cause trouble with decision making. For instance, if you have an excess of clothing, how long does it take to figure out what to wear? To properly care for the clothes?

Health Costs

In serious situations, too much stuff can cause health problems. Clutter can provide a safe haven for bugs and rodents, neither of which you really want living in your house.

For those with indoor allergies, too much stuff can exacerbate the problem.

Relationship Costs

Finally, too much stuff can put a strain on your relationships. Couples can argue over the financial problems caused by buying too much stuff or the state of cleanliness in the house with too much stuff.

I tend to be a bit of a clutterbug, and at one time or another I’ve experienced costs in time, money, and family harmony. Getting rid of the clutter and leading a simple life saves more than just money. It saves time, unneeded stress, and day to day sanity.

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OK – this is the last blog on testing for now and I thought I'd poke around to see if anyone actually has tried to figure out what all this testing actually costs in dollars. I haven't been too lucky with figuring that out for Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia. I did get a copy of a summary of State Appropriations for Pennsylvania's Department of Education. Under a budget line entitled "PA Assessment" there is a number of $54,400,000. I don't know about you, but to me, that's an awful lot of money, But it's not out of line to what all the other states are spending.

I stumbled on a pretty interesting site: Communities for Quality Education. It's an attempt to capture what NCLB has cost and some quotes from this report are very telling. For example, here's what Virginia estimates as simply the administrative costs – not the cost of what it would take to provide students with what they need to take the test:

"In September 2005, the Virginia Department of Education released a cost study that found that local school divisions will have to spend $62 million, $60 million, $61 million, and $65 million more than they are receiving from the federal government, through fiscal year 2008, to administer NCLB. The study covers the costs of meeting the laws requirements (i.e. compliance cost), but does not cover what the state will have to spend to actually get students to pass grade level tests and close the achievement gap (i.e. proficiency costs)."

And another: "The Connecticut State Department of Education reported that through FY 08, it will cost the state approximately $41.6 million to administer NCLB. These are state level costs only; a report on local costs for just three school districts found an additional unmet cost of $22.6 million. The study covers the costs of meeting the law's requirements (i.e. compliance cost) but does not cover what the state will have to spend to actually get students to pass grade level tests and close the achievement gap (i.e. proficiency costs)."

"In July 2004, a study commissioned by the Hawaii legislature found it would cost $191 million between 2003-2008 to meet the requirements of NCLB. Developmental costs were estimated at an additional $24.6 million. The study covers the costs of meeting the law's requirements (i.e. compliance cost) but does not cover what the state will have to spend to actually get students to pass grade level tests and close the achievement gap (i.e. proficiency costs)."

So what are we getting for all this money? Well, according to one writer, what we are getting is very very cheap tests because any assessment worth its salt would cost even more than the computerized drone of an assessment now being used. From another interesting website comes this excerpt:

"Stateline.org's Pauline Vu looks at the rise of standardized testing….The year before NCLB went into effect, Vu reports, states spent $423 million on standardized tests. During the 2007- 08 school year, that amount will increase to almost $1.1 billion. And the windfall largely goes to five (soon to be four) testing companies. And yet, federal funds have been lacking to help pay the tab for administering now 45 million tests a year (going up to 56 million once NCLB's science assessment is added). Hence a reliance in many states on cheaper-to-score multiple-choice assessments."

"But is the answer more money for better tests (and more profits for testing companies)?...So barring an infusion of cash, the consequence of NCLB's testing mania will be an ongoing quest for cheaper and cheaper tests…As Wisconsin's director of testing tells Vu, "People who don't have their heads stuck in the instruction don't realize it's not cheap to do this really well. And right now, I don't know many legislatures that are very open to spending money or raising taxes to develop these kinds of instruments."

So when will this end? How can we bring sanity and reason back to education, to instruction, to assessment? Any ideas?

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“Bear Market Economics” is an expression of Political Economics, an interdisciplinary field focusing on the non-market, collective, and political activity of individuals and organizations. Specific fields of inquiry include regulation, distributive politics, elections, corporate politics, public policy, social welfare, scientific and science policy, political participation and collective action, interest groups, constitutional choice, legislative behavior and organization, judicial institutions, bureaucracies, comparative institutions, cooperative political economy, macro political economy, allocation of resources, the environment, ecology, law and economics, business and government, how markets affect and impact the public and the commons. The orientation to these topics tends to be positive rather than normative.

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Capitalism is preferentially identified by its euphemisms: "Free Enterprise," "market system," "private enterprise." "the American Way," etc. Overt and pervasive partisanship in support of capitalism is not regarded by the American media as an ideological bias negating professional "objectivity" but rather comparable to the serene acceptance of natural laws.